Rachel Sennott’s HBO Comedy Is A Middling Portrait Of Gen Z Malaise

Watching HBO’s new comedy “I Love LA,” you can almost see the outlines of the earlier HBO comedies it’s trying to emulate. With its blend of self-conscious twentysomethings, bold sexual frankness and L.A. stargazing, it feels like a Gen Z mash-up of “Girls” and “Insecure,” with a little bit of “Entourage” sprinkled on top. But its characters are still finding their voices, and “I Love LA” — premiering this Sunday at 10:30 pm; I’ve seen the first three episodes — is still finding its voice, too. It feels slight, unpolished and stuck in between genres: not quite comedy and not quite dramedy. It’s not deep enough to get us emotionally involved, and it’s not funny enough to get us to overlook how shallow it can be.

Rachel Sennott created the series and stars as Maia, a low-level employee at a PR firm who’s turning 27 and isn’t quite sure where she’s headed yet. She has a sweet teacher boyfriend named Dylan (played by “The Hunger Games” veteran Josh Hutcherson), but her career is going nowhere… until she gets her big break when her wild-child friend Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), who’s become an It girl on social media, impulsively moves to L.A. and hires Maia to be her manager. If that set-up sounds a little “generic young-people comedy,” that’s because it is; even the show’s official logline, “An ambitious friend group navigates life and love in LA,” could apply to, oh, about a thousand shows since “Friends” premiered three decades ago.

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Are They Funny Annoying, or Just Annoying?

The debt that Sennott owes to Lena Dunham’s “Girls” is obvious from the opening scenes, with Maia having sex through an earthquake and then carrying on a casual conversation while topless. But Dunham’s scripts had an emotional honesty that “I Love LA” seems to shy away from, preferring to keep things light and surface-level. It’s also heavily steeped in Gen Z self-obsession, with lots of neurotic agonizing and oversharing, with every waking moment filtered through Instagram and TikTok. These kinds of generational stereotypes are ripe for parody, for sure, but it’s hard to tell at times: Are these characters funny annoying, or just annoying?

Sennott does makes an appealing lead (she was great in the indie movie “Shiva Baby”), but her Maia is a little thinly drawn — which is a problem for most of “I Love LA’s” characters, actually. Jordan Firstman is funny as Maia’s quippy gay BFF Charlie, but he already plays a quippy gay man on FX’s “English Teacher,” and he gets better material to work with there. Leighton Meester has fun as Maia’s boss, who spouts lots of feminist buzzwords that add up to nothing. (Plus, “Silicon Valley’s” Josh Brener has a nice cameo as a slick crisis PR manager.) There’s a lack of depth here, though, that keeps us from really connecting with anyone in Maia’s orbit, or even Maia herself.

We’ve Seen It All Done Before, and Done Better

For a show called “I Love LA,” It’s also surprisingly cynical about the town where it’s set. We get snide references to Erewhon smoothies, Lululemon yoga pants and hangover-curing IVs, but the satirical swipes feel stale, like an outsider mocking L.A. after spending just a few hours in town. (“Insecure” did a much better job of both poking fun at L.A.’s unique quirks and also highlighting the city’s sublime beauty.) Forest Whitaker’s daughter True Whitaker plays Maia’s friend Alani, the entitled daughter of a big-time movie producer; it’s a nice meta touch, but her antics are too broad compared to Maia’s earnest yearnings. It’s this kind of tonal unevenness that makes the series feel like a work in progress.

Now you might say I’m well outside the age demographic for “I Love LA,” which: fair enough. But this year alone, I’ve really enjoyed FX’s “Adults” and Prime Video’s “Overcompensating,” which both center on characters in their late teens and early 20s. Both of those shows found a way to deliver big laughs while also establishing an emotional connection that people of any age can appreciate. HBO has had great luck in the past with youth-oriented comedies like this, but with “I Love LA,” it can’t help feeling like we’ve seen it all done before — and done better.

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Rachel Sennott’s “I Love LA” feels like a mash-up of earlier HBO comedies about young people, but it never quite finds a voice of its own.

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